But instead of Daisy responding “We’ve got to beat them down,” Vo has Jordan (more on her below) give the sarcastic retort “You’ve got to beat us down, of course.” It’s a clever shift, fully in keeping with Jordan’s outspoken nature, and it serves to advance her relationship with Nick, who shares her contempt for Tom. It’s all scientific stuff it’s been proved.” Vo keeps this speech word-for-word, including Tom’s touting a white supremacist book called The Rise of the Colored Empires (Fitzgerald’s lightly fictionalized version of an actual book by Lothrop Stoddard). For example, take the racist rant spewed by Daisy’s husband Tom: “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged.
Being queer, being an outsider, being Asian, being a woman – these may not have been much on Fitzgerald’s mind, but they make sense in terms of Fitzgerald’s overall critique of American values, and at times they fit in almost seamlessly with that critique. Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful does all of this.
What I didn’t expect was a fantasy novel that not only treats Gatsby with respect, but that ingeniously makes use of Fitzgerald’s plot and even swatches of his dialogue, not to critique or parody the original, but to find ways of expanding its scope to address contemporary anxieties. I figured if Seth Grahame-Smith couldn’t do any lasting damage to Jane Austen, Gatsby would be safe. Would Weiss and Benioff decide to send a grief-stricken Daisy back to East Egg to burn it all to the ground with a pair of pissed-off dragons? Would the narrator Nick Carraway find himself literally “borne back ceaselessly into the past,” as the famous last line of the novel has it, maybe ending up in Bridgerton? I, for one, was never really concerned about the integrity of Fitzgerald’s original, since I regard it as one of the great American novels. The tale of Gatsby’s fabulous but shady wealth, his giant parties, his pining for the love of Daisy (now married to a racist millionaire), all as told by the transplanted Midwesterner Nick Carraway, is so familiar from movie versions and classroom assignments that it already seems to belong to anyone.
Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby expired at the beginning of this year, the speculation was predictably rampant and occasionally dire.
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